She chafed at the
possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an
exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in
himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of a
man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord
Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his final
chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff.
They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont hear him
apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound: we are seen
as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any name you please,
and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the writing: it may be
perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing of swarms. His
friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his day,
pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-poured,
undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his
imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more
ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace
more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner
on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a
score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope. Nobody
laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the scornful man down
half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology for having done
his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for inability or
ill-will to do it. But Ormont's weapon is the sword, not a pen! Lady
Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to earth.

She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading
him. An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the
commission of such folly. "What do you think? You have seen her, you
say?" she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldling's
fine bile.

Lord Adderwood made answer: "She may be having a hand in it. She
worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground."

"Does she understand good English?"

"Speaks it."

"Can she write?"

"I have never had a letter from her."

"You tell me Morsfield admires the woman--would marry her to-morrow, if
he could get her."

"He would go through the ceremony Ormont has performed, I do not doubt."

"I don't doubt all of you are rea